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Visitors invited to recreate long lost manuscript of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece

In a new commission ahead of the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, artist Clare Twomey is inviting more than 10,000 visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum to recreate a long lost manuscript of Emily Brontë’s masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. The original manuscript no longer survives, but visitors will have the opportunity to copy down the novel, a sentence at a time, into a hand-made book in the very same house where Emily wrote her famous work. Thousands of pencils, specially commissioned by Twomey, have been produced to write the book, and visitors will be invited to keep these as a memento of their participation in the project. The completed book will be exhibited at the Brontë Parsonage Museum during 2018, as part of Emily Brontë’s bicentenary celebrations.

Clare Twomey will be resident in the Museum on Thursday 6 April as the project launches to the public. The first sentence of the novel: “1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my lamdlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with” - will be written by Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum as the Museum opens at 10am.

Jenna Holmes, Arts Officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum said:

“The lost manuscript of Wuthering Heights is one of the great Brontë mysteries, and we’re delighted that Clare Twomey has created this very special work for the Museum in the build up to Emily’s bicentenary in 2018. It’s a simple but very powerful work, which we think will strike a chord with visitors to the Museum this year. We hope they will find it a rich experience to participate in the mass act of writing, discover what it takes to create such a great work of fiction and engage with ideas around manuscripts and legacy. We’ll be updating the story of this book on our social media feeds (#WHManuscript) as the project progresses and celebrating many of the contributing writers and key sentences along the way”.

Clare Twomey is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Her work is concerned with materials, craft practice and historic and social context. A number of her installations disappear or perish in the course of the exhibition period, and often the onlooker is conceptually included in the work. She has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Crafts Council, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Wuthering Heights - A Manuscript opens at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth on Thursday 6 April 2017 and runs until 1 January 2018. It is supported by Arts Council England.